Guide

Dennis Cooper

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780802135803
• eBook ISBN: 9781555847746
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

A brilliant novel of LA's underground from the author of Closer, "the last literary outlaw in mainstream American fiction" (Bret Easton Ellis).
 
Chris is a young porn star who wants to experience death at someone else's hand; Mason has lurid fantasies about members of British pop bands; Sniffles is a teenage runaway whose need for love outweighs his attachment to life. Courtesy of a frankly manipulative author/narrator named Dennis, these characters move through a subterranean Los Angeles where hallucination and reality, sex and suicide, love and indifference run together in terrifying ways.
 
Guide, the fourth novel in a projected five-book cycle, continues to explore the boundaries of experience in the manner that has earned Dennis Cooper comparisons to Poe, Genet, and Baudelaire.
 
"The most seductively frightening, best written novel of contemporary urban life that anyone has attempted in a long time; it's the funniest, too." — Los Angeles Times Book Review
 
"With  Guide, America's most daring novelist has given us his masterpiece." — The Face
 
"Make[s] American Psycho and Lolita seem tame . . . A brilliantly base tale of human self-destruction for the brave." — The Times (London)
 
"Dante's  Inferno with George Bataille as your escort, damaged yet exhilarating." — Arena
 
"Though the story is as compelling as it is perverse, Cooper purposefully overrides it with an innovative style and raw, truthful character studies . . . With Guide, Cooper claims his place, alongside Genet and Burroughs, as a master of his own disenfranchised generation." — Library Journal

Star-Shaped

As I recall, I woke around noon, checked the bed, realized Luke was already up, then got dressed in a hurry and hit the kitchen. Acid hangovers are nice; I’d forgotten. You feel robotic and spacy, or I did. I put on some coffee, brushed my teeth, shaved, then filled my favorite cup, which changes color according to the temperature of its contents, and carried it into the living room. Luke was sitting on the couch, a spiral notebook in his lap, writing something in faint pencil.

“I was just about to leave you a note,” he said.

“Yeah, sorry.” I flopped down in my armchair.

He shut the notebook. “I’m going back to my place, pack up, spend the night there, then bring my things over tomorrow, if that seems okay.”

“Sure.”

“So …” Luke smiled nonchalantly. It didn’t quite work. His face is a horrible hiding place. “When I live here, where am I going to sleep?”

“You can have the office,” I said.

He looked uncertain.

“I’ll move the desk into my bedroom.”

“Oh, cool,” he said. But he still looked uncertain.

“What?” I sipped some more coffee. The cup was red.

He slid the notebook into his backpack. “I just think we should talk.”

“Sure. But can you wait a few minutes? I’m sort of senile until I’ve had two cups of coffee.”

Luke zipped the backpack. “I’ll give you a call later, then,” he said, and hooked the strap over his shoulder. “Because I kind of have to go.”

“Okay, but what is it?”

“Nothing bad.” He grinned goofily and shot to his feet, unfolding and seeming to lift very slightly off the floor for a second or two like a string puppet. “I’ll leave these here. You should play them.” He indicated a heap of cassettes on the arm of the couch. Then he made an abrupt, roughly star-shaped tour of the room, as if he’d misplaced his car keys, although I could see them in his hand.

“Will do.”

Luke’s tour landed him at the door of my office. It was ajar, but he pushed it wide open. I guess I’d left on the light.

“It’s kind of small,” I said.

“No, it’s perfect. So who are those guys on your bulletin board?”

“People who interest me.” I sipped a little coffee. The cup was orangey.

“They all look alike.”

“Yeah, I know.”

He disappeared into the room. “They look like me,” said his voice.

“That’s true.”

“What interests you about them?” I heard his T-shirt brush over my can of pens and pencils, so he might have been leaning in close to the pictures.

“I don’t know.”

“They’re cute,” said his voice. I couldn’t tell if he was kidding.

“Yeah.”

Luke reappeared in the doorway. “Is that why they interest you?” He seemed to be studying me.

“Partly.” I sipped a little coffee. The cup was orange.

“So … I’ll call you later,” he said.

When the door shut, I made a decision. It was very complicated, and I wouldn’t know how to describe it. It might have resembled the kinds of decisions guys make just before they get married or join the army or turn themselves in to the cops or begin to kick drugs. I mean, when they give themselves one stretch of time to go totally wild for the very last time. Then I remembered the fax from the AIDS hospice, walked into my office, and called the number on the letterhead. I told some guy that I’d come visit Sniffles late that afternoon, hung up, checked my date book, confirmed Drew’s arrival time, then took a quick, unremarkable shower.

The doorbell rang. I was in the kitchen, drinking a glass of V8. Its opaqueness was weirding me out, I don’t know why. It just seemed wrong. I poured the remaining juice into the sink, washed out the glass, strolled into the living room, and aligned my right eye with the spy hole. Drew was wearing a giant white R.E.M. T-shirt, black denim cutoffs, and pale green Nikes. He had a large, folksy head, blue eyes, a precious nose, big lips and ears, and an unkempt mod haircut with weirdly long bangs. His arms were skinny and tanned. His legs were chubby and almost fluorescent. A skateboard was wedged into one of his armpits. To keep it aloft, he’d had to thrust out a leg, which might explain why I thought he looked slutty. He was holding a large gift-wrapped box. Every second or two he would look down and check himself out in its gold Mylar paper.

I opened the door very fast. It just seemed like a plan.

Drew’s head snapped up. First he looked shocked, then he tried to adopt a “who cares?” attitude, but a crooked smile ruined the effect he was going for, I guess, and he said, “Fuck.”

“So, yeah.”

He came inside and walked into the living room. “Oh, this guy,” he said. He went straight to Scott’s drawing.

“Can I get you something to drink?”

“I probably should, huh?” He squinted at the drawing. “What does this mean?”

I thought for a second. “It’s art.”

“My dad says art isn’t about anything until someone buys it. Then it’s about the person who owns it.”

Whatever. “So what do you want to drink?”

“Do you have any tequila?”

“I think so.”

“Cool.” Drew leaned in close, studying some detail or other of the drawing. Then he either grew bored or feigned boredom, tore his eyes from the picture, and scanned the living room. He chose the couch, sat roughly in the middle, dropped the skateboard onto the floor and gave it a kick through the room, then set the gift-wrapped box down on the coffee table. I guess he saw me studying it. “It’s a present for you,” he said. “I think you’re gonna like it.”

I walked into the kitchen, got the bottle of Cuervo Gold out of the cupboard, filled a tumbler, then dropped in some ice cubes. Somewhere along the way I decided the box held a dildo. It just seemed to make sense, and I liked the idea. When I returned with the drink I had a scary, unmistakable hard-on. It caused this weird effect in Drew’s eyes, maybe fear, maybe lust. Whatever the mood, it created a slight dissonance in his childish appearance. Admittedly, I was grasping for straws. I sat to his right. I mean, so close that my hip skidded down the side of his body. Then I handed him the drink, rested my huge, chilly hand on his warm, bony knee, and thought, Okay, I get it. I mean, why people fuck guys half their size, weight, maturity, et cetera. It had something to do with a general tenderness toward the young, and something to do with my hangover, and something to do with the chubbiness of his legs. That’s pretty much all I can say about that.

“Whoa,” Drew said, looking at the glass. But I think he meant my hard-on. He took a ludicrously gigantic swallow.

“Tough guy.”

Drew’s eyes teared. “So much”—cough—“shit, so much for your thing on the phone … about”—cough—“about not wanting to … fuck me, liar.”

“This doesn’t mean I’m going to fuck you. It just means you’re cute, which you already know.”

“You think I’m cute.” His voice was all strangled.

“Fuck you. You know I do.” To prove my point, I eased several fingertips inside the leg of his cutoffs.

He was struggling not to look down. “As cute as that guy you like in Smear?”

“Pretty damn close,” I said, and scooched in my fingers another few inches. The denim was bunched in two tight, impassable folds along the borderline of his crotch, but I could feel the sticky warmth of his scrunched dick and balls maybe an inch farther on.

“As cute as that guy you really like? What’s his name? Lou?”

“Luke. No.”

Drew looked confused. “Wait. He’s that guy I saw you with at that art opening once, right? He’s not that cute at all.”

“Point is, I’m not going to fuck you.”

“What’s your problem?” Drew whined. He frowned down at my hand. “I mean, come on.”

“You know what the problem is. You’re fourteen.”

“I’m cool about it.”

“I know.”

“And I’m big for my age.”

“Yeah, but—”

“It’s no big deal.” Drew seemed exasperated. He flopped back onto the cushions and cradled his head in his hands. The change in position inflated the front of his cutoffs, accidentally clearing my route to his crotch. So before they resettled, I reached in and felt him up, just out of curiosity. His dick was finger-size, hard, weirdly dry, and very hot at the tip, like a lit cigarette.

“It is to me,” I said.

Drew’s eyes shut. “But … we talked about this on the phone, and … oh, my God, that feels cool … and you told me you had these … sick fantasies. And how you collected that cute guy’s pubic hairs and all that. And I’m completely cool about anything weird.”

“Listen, you have no idea,” I said. Touching his dick had made everything too realistic or something.

Drew’s eyes opened a fraction. “I need to take a leak,” he said. “Sorry.”

Phew. “It’s over there.” I extracted my fingers. As they came free, I got a tentative whiff of his crotch. Luckily, it smelled pissy.

“Show me,” Drew said. He looked sly. But then he always looked sly. The kid’s face was just permanently sly, like a rock is permanently a random pattern wrapped around a roughly spherical form.

†

Drew faced the toilet, unzipped his cutoffs, reached down inside, and pulled out his hard-on. He tried to aim, but the little thing was too stiff, so he bent his knees slightly, stuck out his ass, and almost managed to line up his dick with the bowl. Then he shot a weak, jittery arc of piss, most of which ended up on the floor. Mason had been insisting that as delectable as Drew’s ass looked on tape, it wasn’t in fact photogenic at all, and I’d thought, Yeah, whatever. But thanks to Drew’s dumb, inadvertently lewd-looking stance, his ass had materialized in the jeans—crack, indentations, and all, albeit slightly stylized by the denim. As I studied the results, my imagination got sort of enmeshed in the perfection of it all, not unlike when I’d first seen Star Wars and thought, Yeah, if I saw that Death Star thing floating in space, I’d turn bad in a second.

“Okay, you win,” I said.

Drew looked back at me, one eye scrunched, confused, or wanting me to think he was confused.

“I changed my mind,” I said

Drew’s cutoffs were so filthy their black had an asphaltesque glimmer, especially the seat, which looked like a silk-screened image of the universe and radiated this sweet, earthy, hashish-like stink. He was lying in front of my TV, awaiting the show. I was kneeling to his immediate left, bent way over, feeling his ass through the denim. At one point I paused, grabbed the videotape, and fed my VCR. I’d labeled the tape MASON DREW THIS, so that no one going through my collection of videos would ever be tempted to play it, no matter how bored they were. Then I grabbed the remote with one hand and recaptured Drew’s ass with the other. It had two distinct modes. Either it was doughy and flat, a tide pool crudely framed by his hipbones, or it was as hard as a helmet and practically pinged when I touched it. It kept shifting back and forth, hard, soft, hard, soft, according to some game in Drew’s mind.

“Punch it,” Drew said. “The tape, not my ass, heh heh.”

I aimed the remote and pushed PLAY.

On TV, Drew was alone, sprawled on Mason’s bed, jerking off with one hand and caressing his chest with the other. Mason’s voice said, “I can’t seem to find it.” Then he entered the picture, sat down on the bed, squinted into the lens, i.e., at us, and said, “I’m going to leave on the lights.” Then Drew said, “Oh, my God, really?” Then Mason, still looking at us, said, “You deserve it,” turned sideways, batted Drew’s hand away from the dick, and replaced it with his own.

“I love when my hair looks like that,” Drew said.

“So what were you thinking?” I wondered.

“What do you mean?”

“Then,” I said. “While he was jerking you off.”

“I don’t know. I was probably hoping my hair looked okay. I’m really cute, aren’t I?”

“Well, duh.”

On TV, Mason kept jerking Drew off. He said, “I’m imagining you’re Chris Gentry from Menswear, so if I call you Chris, or say something that sounds incongruous, don’t worry.” Then Drew raised himself up on his elbows and said, “What is Menswear? Everybody keeps saying I look like somebody in Menswear.” Then Mason said, “They’re a cute, flash, disposable British pop band. Can you pretend you’re asleep?” Then Drew said, “Whatever, sure,” and did a kooky pratfall. Then his unconscious body said, “Are they any good?” Then Mason stood up, walked to the head of the bed, and blocked our view of Drew’s face with his ass. Then his ass started jiggling, and there were the faint squishy sounds of a mouth being fucked. Then Mason said, “They’re all right.”

“This part’s boring,” Drew said. “How long does this last?”

“Longer than it should.”

“So I’d look cute if I was dead, hunh?” Drew looked back at me—or, should I say, he tried to, because his neck wasn’t all that flexible, so I doubt he saw much.

“Maybe for ten minutes.”

Drew looked hurt. “What do you mean?”

“Well, you’d stiffen up.”

Drew thought about that. “I could still look cute, couldn’t I? One time my dad took a picture of me all crashed out and I thought I looked hot.” He turned to the screen. “This is taking forever.”

“Did you ever see that picture of River Phoenix in his coffin?”

“No, unh-unh.”

I got up, walked into my office, opened a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Guided by Voices
• The Freed Weed
• Sunshine Superman
• Blur
• Star-Shaped
• The Spin Article
• Epistle to Dippy